Thursday, June 30, 2016

now it's real... (pm.30.jun.16)>

Thursday's stats:

Low temp: 64.9F (18.3C)

High temp: 75.2F (24.0C)
Rainfall: 2.38" (6.0cm) --updated @ 8:00pm

I woke up just before 3:30am and immediately thought, "it's a classic monsoon downpour".  Heavy, steady rain with occasional rumbling thunder continued until just after 5:00am, with just a bit less than two inches (4.8cm) in the rain gauge to show for it.  The rest of the day has featured very high humidity (80-92%), much more clouds/fog than sun, and other scattered rain showers late this morning and again late this afternoon and evening which have not been as heavy (yet) as our pre-dawn deluge.  Currently it is cloudy, foggy, drizzly, showery, and downright dreary.


Monsoon conditions have been threatening -- surging and retreating, ebbing and flowing, moving in and moving out -- for a couple of weeks now.  But I think we'd all agree that the overall trend has been toward a more moisture-laden and borderline saturated air mass, which is exactly what we would expect as we finish off the month of June.  I've recorded about three inches (7.6cm) of rain in the last 36 hours, and that's a sign of things to come as our daily rainfall rates rise rapidly with the arrival of July.


Computer models can be notoriously confounding in our part of the world, and even more so during the monsoon season -- BUT -- they are still indicating some very heavy rains across much of Himachal Pradesh this coming weekend.  Amounts in excess of 5" (12cm+) are showing up on the charts, especially between Friday night and early Monday morning, as deep tropical moisture gets squeezed and condensed by significantly cooler air arriving in the upper-levels of the atmosphere.  The wait is over.


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